Myron Kellner-Rogers
answers:
Let me begin with this bit of heresy: Over the past
decade, the elegant solutions and sophisticated
methodologies that failed to transform the business
sector have been imposed on our community-based
institutions. Public schools have been urged to adopt the
methods of total quality, continuous improvement,
customer satisfaction and strategic planning as the
salvation for what ails them. As the methods have
infiltrated the corridors of schools across the nation,
they’ve limited our language—students have
become customers—and diminished our relationships
with one another—we’re now stakeholders. We
have developed an unconscious mythology about the value
of these tools on the work of the people who live in our
organizations and our communities. Yet as the techniques
have become orthodoxy, have we lost our connection to the
purposes the tools were created to serve? If we are to
fairly assess the impact of planning processes in our
organizations, we need to return to the purposes we
pursued them for in the first place, and look unabashedly
at what the processes have produced.

Why Plan
Anyway?
What is the purpose of planning? In my view, planning is
about freeing an organization from the limitations of its
history, liberating its capacity for creativity. At its
best, planning is both a reflective and creative process,
allowing an organization to reinterpret its history in
the context of its present experience and projected
future. Whatever methodology is used, this undertaking
should produce a change in what we know ourselves to be
in the context of the world we live in. Planning is about
changing the identity of the organization.

The purpose of planning is never to
produce a plan. Creating intelligent plans is easy and
satisfying, but we all know that they often collapse at
implementation. Planning is about creating the
possibility of new and different action; action that is
coherent with the identity of the organization and the
needs of the community it serves. This possibility for
acting differently and coherently springs from
people’s ability to enter into a shared sense of
what is significant, what really matters, in their past,
present and future. We act on what we know ourselves to
be.

Measure What We
Do
Judge strategic planning by what the organization does.
Are its responses more intelligent, creative and
congruent? Are individuals and groups within the
organization better able to make local decisions and act
in ways that serve the desired direction of the
organization? Can people recognize the significance of
unanticipated changes in the environment and respond, or
are they confused and in need of direction? Can people
learn quickly, translating new actions into deeper
meaning? Is the organization becoming more intelligent
and more responsive to the community it serves? If
administrative leaders, teachers and parents looked at
the same event would they see the same thing—or do
multiple meanings still paralyze people?

As any organization generates a deeper
shared sense of who it is and what its environment means,
its capacity for rapid, flexible, congruent action will
increase. If the outcome of a planning process is that
people require more management and guidance—in the
form of rules, regulations or incentives—to act
intelligently, then your planning process has failed to
produce a shared basis for interpreting the
world.

Next Steps: Deepening Meaning,
Liberating Action
Learning is absent from most planning processes I see.
Every plan has intended outcomes, the statements of
results we desire, stated as objectives. But from the
moment any plan is implemented, unintended consequences
instantly appear. Usually, the evaluation of the plan is
against objectives, and we deny the real experience of
people, searching for what we hope for rather than what
is showing up. It is in the unintended consequences,
however, where the greatest possibility of
learning.

We should create forums where people
can connect with one another around their real
experience, through conversations about meaning and
origin. People will begin to see the sources of
incoherence—from lack of information to
relationships—limiting their shared capacity.
Conversations about what is really happening allow people
to see the conditions they have co-created that limit
their ability to move into the future. They also create
the possibility for changing these conditions.
Connecting the System to Itself
Most strategic planning processes begin from the
invisible assumption that this is the domain of a few
smart people, who then can turn over their work to be
implemented. Implementation is then a gargantuan task,
because those not involved in creating the plan do not
share the meaning the creators intended.

Remember that what we do is what we
know, and none of us own what we don’t create.
Processes that engage the whole system in the creation of
the plan will always produce better results, since people
will collaborate in meaning making.

There are many whole system planning
processes around these days, from Future Search to Real
Time Strategic Change or Open Space.
What links them all are some shared assumptions. They
begin from the assumption that the information needed to
solve a problem or create a future is already in the
system. The need is to bring the people in the system
together so they can connect with each other around
questions that really matter, and create a collective
intelligence that is capable of a new possibility. When
the planning process is a system-wide shared endeavor,
the commitment to coherent and creative action is
awesome.